M.K. Foster

Fulbright-Queen's University Belfast Scholar Award (Creative Writing)

Dr. M.K. Foster is a poet, fiction writer, and historian of science from Alabama. Written in tandem, her creative and critical works thrive on a symbiotic relationship rooted in her archival research on spectacular monstrosity, eco-horror, and apocalypses in the Renaissance imagination. A 2024 MacDowell Fellow in Literature, Foster’s creative works have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and she has presented her research at the National Museum of Denmark, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, the Renaissance Society of America, and elsewhere.  

As a Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Center at Queen’s University Belfast, she will draw on Irish mythology and the fossil record presence of mass extinction events in the region’s rock formations as she crafts ARKBIRD, a verse novel retelling of the Deluge epic as set within the 21st-century crisis of climate change.